Now your Secretary is just a call away!

Chennai, Oct 2: Preparing a business proposal to booking tickets and taking care of hospital visits of aged people back home are no longer stressful jobs for busy professionals thanks to personal secretarial services launched by a city-based firm.

With a view to serving busy professionals and those on the move, Nirmitha Professional Services, part of the Nirmitha Group, has launched its division ''my-secretary.com'' that will enable individuals hire a secretary to help them in their day-to-day activities.

The company has tied-up with Reliance Telecommunication to provide a single point contact phone number 33443333 on which the secretary would be available to take the requests.

Services are offered under four broad categories of professional, hospitality, travel and transportation and miscellaneous to take care of the needs of an individual.

These include picking up guests from railway stations or airports, managing family events, reminding about important occasions and anniversaries and arranging a plumber, carpenter, mason or electrician.

According to company Chief Executive Officer Sankar Venkatraman, an engineering graduate and a Sloan Fellow from London Business School, the concept was the answer to the question why personal secretaries should be limited to only the senior management personnel.

"I was thinking why only the senior executive in an organisation has a secretary. It will be always helpful to anybody if there is a secretary (to assist in his day-to-day work).. By appointing a secretary, you would be able to focus on routine work and use the time effectively," he told PTI here.

"Even a customer who needs to book a movie ticket or needs to be reminded about an important work can use our secretarial service. Our people here work from eight in the morning to t eight in the night," Venkatraman said.

A customer can opt for services from three different packages as per their requirement, Venkatraman, who has been in the IT industry for over two decades and has rich experience in general and strategy management, said.

According to him the concept is slowly picking up in India while in developed countries, particularly in United States and in some European countries, such services are offered at a cost of USD 30 to USD 40 per hour.

"We are offering it less than Rs 30 per day. In fact since the launch of this service on August 19, we have already got more than 26 subscribers who include CEOs and individuals," he said adding "Non-core (business) of people will be the core (business) for us".

Venkatraman said they maintain a database in which the customer''s service requests are securely maintained.

He said the company has 30 members in the Logistics team with GPS installed devices who would be always on the move.

On future plans, he said the company would extend the services to Bangalore, Hyderabad and had set a target of covering 7,500 customers.

He said they are currently working on a similar platform exclusively for the student community which is expected to be rolled out in the next two-three months.

PTI